Is BSD the new GPL?

http://zedshaw.com/essays/is_bsd_the_new_gpl.html

by okal • 15 years ago

64 38 15 years ago

IANAL, but: It would appear to me that the author doesn't understand the GPL very well. If my code is BSD licensed and yours is GPL, I can submit pieces of my code to your project but if I take pieces of your code into my project, my project is now subject to the virality properties of the GPL and itself becomes essentially licensed under GPL. This is where the author seems confused: if I subsume GPL code into a BSD-licensed project, my project becomes licensed under GPL. Given that I chose the BSD license for my project I'm assuming it would now be obvious to the OP why this might be onerous.

okal• 15 years ago

>> This is where the author seems confused: if I subsume GPL code into a BSD-licensed project, my project becomes licensed under GPL. Given that I chose the BSD license for my project I'm assuming it would now be obvious to the OP why this might be onerous.

I think his intention was for BSD licensors to accept that as an inherent "danger" of their chosen licence. Like he pointed out, you wouldn't be able to use proprietary code from Google or Apple simply because it incorporates your BSD licensed code, so why should it be a problem when the aggressor - in a manner of speaking - is using a copyleft license?

rst• 15 years ago

Zed starts with two tweets that make exactly that point. He understands perfectly. You misunderstand _his_ point:

He's releasing Lamson under GPL, so the Django folks can't use it. But if he was releasing Lamson under a proprietary license, they couldn't even look at it. The GPL leaves them better off. But while BSD projects generally don't complain about proprietary forks, some of them whine bitterly about the GPL (which, again, leaves them better off).

Choosing the BSD license for your code is, in effect, choosing to allow others to rerelease under more restrictive terms. If you made that choice, I'm not sure it makes a whole lot of sense to complain when people do that.

nupark210• 15 years ago

Proprietary forks are always able to submit pieces of their code back to the originating BSD project. That's fine -- proprietary developers never claimed to be anything other than what they are, and if they eventually submit something back, that's nice.

GPL developers claim to be open, but then take the originating code and place it under onerous "open" terms. This triggers the classic "hypocrite" response: they claim to be open, but they're actually attaching a viral license to my work. Any improvements they make can NEVER be sent back to us without all the contributors agreeing to license under the BSD license.

In real terms, the GPL fork is a dead-end one for a BSD licensed project. The commercial fork is, actually, not -- the company is quite able to push back changes at any time.

No contributions will ever result from the GPL fork, and given that the BSD license provides a superset of the freedoms of the GPL license, it's clear that the GPLers are only licensing under the GPL to enforce their own politics on the BSD licensed code.

anonymoushn• 15 years ago

If there is no open-source version of some piece of software, the BSD folks are better off than they would be if there was only a GPL version. In the absence of a GPL version, the newly-created liberally licensed version of the software is likely to get more contributors and users. In the presence of a GPL version, the BSD version has substantially lower chances of success given the same effort from the maintainers. If I am only willing to use liberally licensed components in my project, GPL software is actually worse than proprietary software.

zdw2• 15 years ago

Fundamentally, understand the goals of a license before you pick it.

Sometimes people pick a license, and are unhappy when they don't get the results they want - for example, there's this paragraph at the bottom of the BSD licensed OpenSSH page:

http://openssh.org/

Please take note of our Who uses it page, which list just some of the vendors who incorporate OpenSSH into their own products -- as a critically important security / access feature -- instead of writing their own SSH implementation or purchasing one from another vendor. This list specifically includes companies like Cisco, Juniper, Apple, Red Hat, and Novell; but probably includes almost all router, switch or unix-like operating system vendors. In the 10 years since the inception of the OpenSSH project, these companies have contributed not even a dime of thanks in support of the OpenSSH project (despite numerous requests).

(not that I think that the OpenBSD project ever expected renumeration, but imagine if you had a project that was as successful as OpenSSH and nobody ever flipped you a dime).

nupark210• 15 years ago

I think this is a fundamental misinterpretation of their position.

OpenBSD can both complain about lack of contributions AND still believe that the BSD license is most amenable to their goals.

If I put a bowl of candy out at my restaurant, I will probably complain about a customer that takes all the candy in the bowl. However, I will still leave the candy out, and there's no fundamental incompatibility between my complaint and my choice to make the candy available.

I would reserve special invective for a customer that took the entire candy bowl and then -- claiming to be a liberator -- passed it out on the street outside my restaurant alongside a coupon for their own restaurant.

In my mind, the first example (takes all the candy) is the example of a commercial organization that doesn't give anything back. It's unfortunate, but it's the cost of doing business, and their decision doesn't directly negatively impact me (other than losing some cheap candy).

The second example ("liberates" the candy and then uses it in a way that causes direct material damages to my restaurant's business) is how GPLers that fork BSD licensed code are perceived.

click170• 15 years ago

I think the op's point was that the perception of 'GPLers forking BSD licensed code as being bad' is the fundamental misunderstanding of some people using the BSD license.

If they want contributions back, they are welcome to add a clause to the BSD license or use the GPL (or write their own), but they choose the BSD license in its current form and then get upset when someone stays within compliance of the license while doing something they don't like.

chimeracoder• 15 years ago

A better analogy would use a non-rival good, since taking all the candy precludes anybody else from having it.

Something like a work of art might be better. Let's say you sculpt a statue, and you allow anybody to view it for free, including the right to take pictures of it for free. You have an optional donation box next to the statue, but nothing mandatory.

Now, someone takes a picture of it, retouches it photo-editing software, and then sells that photo to millions of people and makes billions of dollars off of it.

Is it a 'cost of doing business'? No, because the cost had already been assumed by the time you'd decided to license the statue the way you did. Is it illegal? Of course not, because that's how you licensed it. Are you worse off for it? No, because you lost nothing - viewing the statue is not a rival good.

When viewed in this light, it certainly seems like a rather rude thing to do, but the artist knew that this was a risk when licensing his/her statue in that way.

WayneDB• 15 years ago

You are truly free according to the license and the law. That fact has nothing to do with how people will treat you if you choose a decidedly less free license like GPL.

Honestly, this is like complaining that people got upset at you for bringing a crying child into a restaurant, despite the fact that it's perfectly legal!

abrahamsen• 15 years ago

He seems to be complaining about a double standard.

Some people (proprietary software) are applauded for bringing crying children into the restaurant, while others (copyleft software) are criticized for the same act, to use your (weird) analogy.

adbge• 15 years ago

I used to very much prefer BSD-style licenses on the grounds that freedom means you're free to create a proprietary derivative. I assumed that a company would rather contribute to a BSD'd project than a GPL'd project on these grounds.

It recently occurred to me, though, that some companies may prefer to contribute to GPL'd projects over BSD'd ones. When Red Hat contributes to the Linux kernel, they know that their competitors will not be able to create a derivative without also releasing it under the GPL. Red Hat's competitors can't create proprietary derivatives that would compete with Red Hat so, in essence, it's safer for a company to contribute to a GPL'd project than a BSD'd project.

This is a really interesting and non-obvious property of the GPL that I never see mentioned.

icebraining• 15 years ago

Well, that's the basis for most dual-licensed projects. For example, the MySQL AB people used to say "If you're free, we're free, if you're proprietary, we're commercial". I think Qt uses a similar mindset.

zokier2• 15 years ago

Qt pre-Nokia was GPL/proprietary dual-licensed. Re-licensing it as LGPL (and thus allowing proprietary projects to link to it) was one of the first reforms Nokia made.

rmc• 15 years ago

If you own the copyright on all the code (i.e. you didn't accept any external patches), then you can release the code as GPL and also relicence it to yourself as a propriatary code. You don't need BSD for this.

If someone contributes to your GPLed project, then you cannot 'make propriatary' that contribution, unless they assign copyright to you./

arto• 15 years ago

Some of the confusion here arises from not clearly differentiating between legal and moral obligations. It's perfectly reasonable to ensure that the legal strings attached to a piece of software are as few as possible (BSD/MIT/ISC, the Unlicense, or the WTFPL), but still encourage the community to hold themselves to higher moral standards regarding e.g. attribution and contributing back to a project.

dwc• 15 years ago

This is exactly correct. It is usual in other areas such as constitutional law for organizations and groups to devote themselves to either legal xor moral obligations. The US's ACLU seldom condemns the reprehensible acts of some of its clients, for instance. Rather they limit themselves to furthering the rule of law in general. But the BSD communities tend to be small and take on both roles, for if they didn't there would be nobody else to do it. I do not think major players in major BSD licensed projects are confusing these issues, but onlookers and others often times do.

The position seems clear: 1) You can use BSD licensed software as per the generous license, and 2) FOSS developers should facilitate sharing code, including sharing reciprocally with other FOSS developers. No violation of item 2 will interfere with item 1.

By far the largest part of the past kerfuffle between OpenBSD and Linux developers had to do with violating the BSD license. This isn't easy to do, as there's not a whole lot to violate. I believe the violations were simple mistakes, due to ignorance/unfamiliarity. They were rectified after a time.

skrebbel• 15 years ago

Great article. It made me realize that BSD-licensing really does mean "others can do next to anything with your code". So they can sell it (yeah ok, I knew about that one already). But they can also put it into a GPL project. Or mix it with tabasco and blueberry jam.

If you don't want that anyone can do anything with your code, anything (as long as they keep the sticker that it came with), don't use the BSD license.

tzury• 15 years ago

In my ladder, Public Domain is at the top, and proprietary is at the bottom, all others are just in between, varies in some parts, identical in others.

I do not see how SQLite could have done any better with any other license for instance.

If someone on this earth is low enough to remove credits from code, or even worse, ship it under own name, there is nothing to prevent him/her from doing so, not even lawyers GNU will never hire to to sue this cracker.

tikhonj• 15 years ago

The usual argument is that the GPL encourages others to contribute back to the free software ecosystem. If you write something cool and unique and release it under the GPL, anybody who builds stuff off it will have to release their code as well, leading to more code for everybody.

zokier2• 15 years ago

On an unrelated note: here we are seeing the damage that url shorteners do. The tr.im URLs in Zeds tweet are unavailable, even though the content probably is still up. And there is no way for the reader to find out where the links were pointing.

sixcorners• 15 years ago

http://urlte.am/

huxley• 15 years ago

FYI, this article is about 2.5 years old.

Zed Shaw has in the interim released some projects under a BSD license (like Mongrel2) while other projects like Lamson (I believe) are licensed under GPLv3.

Is BSD the new GPL?

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